Reference edition:

T. Pritchard, The ‘Ambrose’ Text of Alexander and the Brahmans, in «Classica et Mediaevalia» 44, 1993, 109-139.

The Latin text of the Commonitorium Palladii is a translation of a Greek text with a complex tradition, which has come down to us in different editions and by different routes, both Greek and Latin. The title it usually bears, Commonitorium, is a name better suited to the first part of the operetta, consisting in a letter which the author, possibly Palladius, bishop of Elenopolis in Bithynia between the 4th and 5th century, sent to an unnamed addressee, containing a compendium of news on India and on the Brahman philosophers, some of which had an autoptic origin. It comes with a second part, namely coming from Arrian and referred to as De gentibus Indiae et Brahmanibus, which contains an account of a conversation between Alexander the Great and the Brahmans about their ascetic way of life. It intertwines with the tradition of the Alexander Romance, since it was interpolated in some of its Greek editions (not in the older edition α and therefore not in the Latin translation by Julius Valerius which is related to it; see Julius Valerius page). The first witness of this second part of the text is a fragmentary Greek papyrus dated to the 2nd century AD., the high date of which excludes that the author is really Arrian. To this text Palladius added the first part, the actual Commonitorium, and overlaid it with a faint Christian reading. During the following decades the text is partially rewritten, giving birth to a versio ornatior and a versio ornatior et interpolata. The main and most ancient Latin translation of the text, reproduced here, appears to have versio ornatior as its source text. Some codes attribute it, with no solid reason, to Ambrosius. Telfryn Pritchard published an edition in 1993, based on four mss., which is the one here taken as the reference edition. A new one is being prepared by Marc Steinmann and me, after having traced 27 manuscripts ranging from the 9th to the 16th century, the vast majority containing the whole text. [R. Tabacco]